MCP Origins and Requests For Startups — Theodora Chu, Model Context Protocol PM, Anthropic
AI Summary
The video is a talk by Theo, a product manager at Anthropic, discussing MCP (Model-Context Protocol), an open-source protocol designed to provide LLMs with model agency by allowing them to interact with the external world beyond their immediate context window. The origin story highlights the initial idea from two engineers noticing the constant manual copying of external context into LLMs and envisioning a protocol that standardizes and simplifies this interaction. MCP was open-sourced in November last year and has since gained momentum with adoption by various coding tools and major tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. The talk covers the challenges and design principles of MCP, including shifting complexity to clients, support for streaming HTTP, and enhancing developer experience. Looking ahead, MCP will focus on enriching the agent experience, improving developer tools, and expanding the server ecosystem beyond engineering to verticals like sales and finance. The speaker encourages community involvement for contributions and emphasizes the future potential of automated MCP generation and increased demand for AI security and observability tooling.